Orbis Ireland Receives Continued Support from Irish Aid’s Civil Society Fund

This vital funding empowers us to continue delivering life-changing eye care to Ethiopia’s most vulnerable communities and to expand our programmes even further—transforming lives and strengthening health systems for the future.

Since 2007, Orbis has been building a comprehensive and sustainable eye care network in Ethiopia, focusing on women, children, and marginalised populations, particularly in regions without eye care services.

Thanks to continued support, the next phase of this transformative initiative will expand our reach even further. Between 2025 and 2030, we will extend our services to an additional 1 million people, bringing the total impact to 4.6 million individuals across 63 districts in Southern and Southwestern Ethiopia.

This phase of the project will:

• Deepen school-based eye care programmes

• Strengthen services at local eye care units

• Establish partnerships to improve access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

• Train local healthcare providers to ensure long-term sustainability and integrate eye care into Ethiopia’s national health system.

Our work continues to focus on eliminating trachoma, one of the leading infectious causes of blindness worldwide, and tackling cataracts and uncorrected refractive errors.

The Trachoma Atlas is a powerful tool that helps visualise progress. Using district-level data, it shows a dramatic reduction in trachoma prevalence in Ethiopia between 2014 and 2024. Today, large areas highlighted in green on the map have a trachoma prevalence of under 5% — meeting the World Health Organisation’s threshold for elimination.

Through the continued support of Irish Aid, Orbis Ireland is proud to play a role in building stronger, more resilient health systems. Together, we are transforming lives — one person, one community, and one district at a time — through the gift of sight.